In A Visual Vocabulary of Feelings, David Bleich invites viewers into an immersive world where emotion is rendered both monumental and intimate. The exhibit includes a unique group of large images that represents feelings people share described by a one-word title. It includes three distinct sets of large format images—each one sealed beneath a glossy acrylic surface that intensifies their depth and visual weight: In A Crowded Manhattan created by people in civilization; In a Wetland, The Slough, found in Ft. Myers, Florida and cordoned off to promote tourism; and In the Aialik Glacier in Kenai Fjords National Park in Alaska, a natural phenomenon in the wilderness. Each image presents a wide variety of details, and the one-word title suggests the common observation that feelings occupy attention and space while challenging us to account for their many parts and meanings. We in society court this combination of actual scenes and images of these scenes as rich sources of understanding and pleasure.
These are not just photographs to admire; they are emotional landscapes to navigate. David says that large images “encourage close reading.” He says, “Sometimes I think of large images as ‘zones of civilization’ that teach us to value the achievements of the details of civilization with the same mental energy that we give to ‘natural wonders.’”
Some examples of the titles that anchor each image include Remembrance, Profundity, and Rage. These titles don’t describe the content so much as they unlock it—guiding the viewer toward the emotional territory David wishes to explore. It is a powerful device and in David’s hands, it works beautifully. The photos don’t illustrate feelings—they embody them.
David says that an adjective used to describe the majority of images in this exhibit is “Crowded,” yet this does not imply chaos, it suggests richness. He says the term indicates “different points of interest serving one another.” In each photo, multiple points of interest co-exist and serve one another, allowing for a complexity that mirrors the layered nature of emotion itself. For example, an urban scene may contain not just movement, but tension. A reflection might reveal more than the subject it distorts. These dense images ask viewers to look again and again.
David explains, “I was surprised at my response to Profundity. It is one of a few reflection images that seemed to speak anew when I viewed them completed and mounted. I noticed the blue sky at the bottom where the ‘depths’ of the pool lived, and I imagined that the reflections of the trees were really reaching way down deep into the water. I have to say that the trees were performing the common thought among us that some things are really deep and feel the sky at the bottom, the last stop!”
David’s images are printed on metallic paper and mounted with an acrylic face. He says “The metallic paper, for me, lets the image speak in a way that you can feel its breath. It brings the image into living action, and I use it because these ‘still’ images live as if animated in my imagination. The images change in response to the light in which they are viewed. The effect is similar for urban and natural sites. I always feel it is remarkable that my response to buildings and urban scenes are just as alive as my responses to the many natural mysteries that I photograph.”
David, who is a professor of English at The University of Rochester says that his exhibit grew from his interest in Readers’ Response theory. “My first book, entitled Readings and Feelings, published in 1975, struck the note you may find in this exhibit. I have been interested in the difficulty people (mostly men) have in articulating feelings. I have studied this phenomenon since high school. I noticed that I was a respondent—a reader—of my own photos. That meant that a different part of my mind was at work in viewing, than in making, images. Part of our work as makers and respondents is to get these two parts of our minds to work together, to find ‘the right word’ for the feelings that lead to making images, and those that follow from viewing them.”
David Bleich’s A Visual Vocabulary of Feelings is a compassionate exhibit–formally ambitious and emotionally resonant. Through oversized, visually crowded, and psychologically charged photographs, David doesn’t just show us feelings, he invites us to live inside them.
David’s exhibit can be seen at Image City Photography Gallery, 722 University Avenue, Rochester, NY, from June 10-July 6, 2025. If you have a comment or question about David’s show, please place it in the comment box below.
Thank you to Dick Bennett and David Bleich for contributing to this article.